


Teach them to fly

by Beleriandings



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character study I guess???, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, canon-compliant pterandon fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25773535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Myfanwy doesn't always understand everything the other inhabitants of Torchwood Three say and do. But if nothing else, she's learning.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Comments: 29
Kudos: 63





	Teach them to fly

When she comes to the new world, it’s in a blazing tangle of light.

It’s sudden, too: one moment she’s soaring across the expanse of the valley, the warm sunshine on her wings heating her blood through the fine membrane as she spots her prey below her. Today’s a day for hunting, but then most days are; her hatchlings are back in her nest, and they’re growing fast, hungry all the time.

She’s flying downwards, beginning to pull back her wings as she drops into a dive. And that’s when the light opens up before her, a whorl of blazing brightness, and it’s too late to turn, gravity won’t let her, _and_ -

-And it’s dark, and cold, and suddenly she’s colliding with something hard, screaming out in pain and fear. She thrashes and shrieks against the ground, harder than any she’s known before. Not the soft-needled loam of the forest floor, but something like rock, smooth and slick and not warmed by any sun.

It’s damp, and she’s hurt, skin all scratched up and a sharp, blazing pain in one of the small bones at the outside of her wing.

But still she picks herself up as quickly as she can, flying again; the air is always safer. They can’t catch you there, her own mother taught her in her dim memories of being a hatchling herself. Her siblings and her mother’s beak against the side of her head, nudging her out of the nest, the dizzying feeling of flying for the first time.

This is much more frightening; it’s raining, but it’s not the kind of rain she knows. Not heavy, hot drops, no familiar rumble of thunder or flashes of lightning, no lingering smell of ozone. Instead it’s a frigid, misty sort of rain, overlaid by a sharp noxious chemical scent. Like the marsh lights you got sometimes in the forest but choking, oppressive. It’s dark, but there are harsh lights like blazing, moving suns, and her hearing is full of a deep background thrum that is nothing like the soft rustlings of the forest, the occasional cries of others of her kind as they fly above, the roars of other creatures amidst the trees telling her where to hunt, and where to avoid.

She screeches out her distress as she slams into another cold, hard surface, all her senses scrambling to adjust to this new place. She needs to get back to her hatchlings, they’re hungry, she needs to-

And that’s when she sees him for the first time. The strange, pallid little creature, flightless and ungainly, that she’ll one day call her hatchling just as surely as the ones she raised from an egg in her own nest.

(She’ll come to know him as her hatchling, yes, but she’ll also come to know him as _Ianto._ But that’s for later. She doesn’t know what a name is yet, the seemingly random combinations of syllables that these odd creatures attach so much significance to.)

He’s peering around a corner from beyond something large and angular. He’s staring at her with wide eyes, like the prey she hadn’t been able to hunt earlier, frozen before her. She screeches at him, furious and desperate in her confusion, and for a moment she almost rips his head off out of sheer frustration.

But for some reason, she doesn’t. Instead she lands on the ground in front of him, cautious of everything in this fearful new place. She expects him to run away, hopes he will at any rate. She doesn’t want to have to deal with him now.

But he edges forwards. He’s holding something in one of his hands that he keeps glancing at. It’s flashing and emitting odd little sounds and he takes a deep breath, then makes it disappear at his side, somewhere she can’t see. He’s got odd little hands, stubby digits and no claws at all, she thinks; certainly no wings. She wonders how he can possibly feed himself, poor thing.

As she watches, he seems to shove his hand in a flap in whatever it is that’s draped around him; she doesn’t think it’s part of his body, but with an odd little creature like this she doesn’t know how to tell. He searches around for a moment, looking rather frantic and eventually pulls out something small and flat. He moves his face, stretching out his mouth. “Look!” he says. “Got you some chocolate! ...Don’t know if you like chocolate, but I couldn’t find an entire side of beef at the Tesco Metro, so it’ll have to do for the moment… bet you’ve never had anything like that in the Cretacious, anyway...”

He throws the object on the ground, and she reels back a little; she can smell something coming from it, a smell that’s unfamiliar but delicious, cutting through the fumes. But she’s still wary.

“Go on” he says. “It’s seventy percent cacao!”

She looks at him, then back to the thing on the ground. It smells better than he does; barely any meat on him, poor little flightless hatchling. But the thing on the ground smells wonderful.

She eats it in one bite.

And that’s how she discovers chocolate. Her little hatchling – which he is in her mind now, even though usually hatchlings don’t bring their mother food but the other way around – is gone for a while, and she’s scared. She flies around a bit, into the air, but up above the situation is worse; she can’t see the stars here, and that terrifies her.

Eventually she begins to grow hungry again, and frantic with it. And she knows that if she’s hungry, her hatchlings back at the nest must be half-starved, crying out for her. She cries out herself, flying around in a panic until she crashes through something sharp and clear into a huge, angular cavern.

And it’s there that he finds her again, her little hatchling.

Except this time, he’s got someone else with him.

She’s wary of this one; he smells different, making her head swim. She wants to pick him up and drop him from a height, so she does.

But no sooner has she done it then she feels a sharp stinging pain, and the world collapses around her, fracturing to pieces and swirling away to blackness.

And when she wakes up, she’s at Torchwood.

She doesn’t know it’s called that, of course. Not then, anyway. But she learns all the sounds they make down below her over time, and she learns the sounds they give themselves. She learns that her little hatchling is _Ianto_ , and the one who came with him the second time is _Jack_. She learns that the one who smells of metal and lightning and who brings her meat that tastes like she’s never known meat to taste before, that one’s name is _Suzie_. She likes Suzie a lot, but she’s not really her hatchling; more like a force of nature, like a thunderstorm or an earthquake. There are others too; an _Owen_ and a _Toshiko_ , who talk in fast voices and keep away from her mostly.

But Ianto doesn’t keep away, and nor does Suzie. Those two come to her most days, taking turns bringing her food, taking her waste away. Sometimes they let her out, usually when it’s dark; it’s still too cold compared to the climate she’s used to, and she still finds it strange and disturbing that she often can’t see the stars here, but she’s getting used to it. At least sometimes she can see the moon. The best times though are when it’s light, and she can pluck white birds from over the water, relishing the hot tang of their blood and the crunch as she snaps their necks, the instinctive thrill of hunting tasting like home in her mouth.

Not that home is always a good thing to think of; she grieves the hatchlings she left behind, screaming her sorrow out over the sea, or up into the starless sky as she skims the dark waves. But she knows somehow that she’s never going to see them again, never going to fly over the forest to bring them food to keep them alive.

She wonders sometimes what happened to them, but there’s no sense to that, no sense in hurting when it won’t bring them back.

After a little while, Ianto gives her a name of her own, that little collection of sounds that these creatures seem to prize and treasure so dearly; _Myfanwy_ , he gives her, and she doesn’t really understand why but she’s glad of it, glad to be given these sounds. They’re nice sounds at least, and he makes the _mouth-eyes-happy_ face – it’s called a _smile_ , she learns - when he first calls her them.

Suzie talks to Myfanwy sometimes; she doesn’t think Myfanwy understands, and granted she doesn’t understand everything, but she understands some things. She understands that Suzie is hurting, can hear the blood running under her voice, the restlessness in her as she paces around below. Suzie smells of metal and she’s fierce and sharp; she would make a strong hunter, Myfanwy thinks, if she weren’t so _tired_.

Sometimes, Suzie brings a papery-soft thing up to Myfanwy’s nest and reads her the words from it, collections of sounds with a lilting rhythm like the running of a stream, like rhythmic footfalls or rare wingbeats as she soars on the thermals. Myfanwy hears Suzie talk about death and fear and love through these words, and though she doesn’t understand everything she likes to hear it anyway.

Ianto comes to talk to her too. He brings her food as often as Suzie does, and he talks to her too; rambles about someone she’s never met, someone called _Lisa_. He looks like he’s hurting when he says those sounds, but like he needs to say them anyway.

She doesn’t really understand how that can be, but she sits and listens quietly anyway.

Increasingly these days, he smells like blood and metal, not like himself. She’s worried about him; he looks hollow, his eyes dull and tired all the time. He’s lost a little weight, but she knows there isn’t a lack of food because he always feeds _her_ : it can’t be a bad year for hunting, she thinks. Maybe he’s sick? She doesn’t know how to tell. All she can do is drop food back in his lap, trying to get him to eat too. One day she even saves him a freshly-killed seagull from her trip out over the water, but he doesn’t seem to appreciate it nearly as much as he should, no matter how much she encourages him.

One day, Suzie isn’t there anymore.

Instead there’s a new one, a _Gwen_. She smells different to Suzie, but Myfanwy could get used to that. She does wonder what happened to Suzie though; she misses her. It’s Ianto who feeds her now, almost always, and he never says anything about Suzie.

He does talk about _Lisa_ though, more and more; he’s nervous, something’s coming, like a storm just over the horizon.

And then one day she finds out.

The first she knows of _Lisa_ is that everything goes dark, lights red and flashing and harsh. There are loud noises, and she can hear Ianto’s voice and Jack’s, raised in anger; maybe they’re fighting, she thinks, but she doesn’t know why. There are other sounds too though, metallic screeching, an unfamiliar voice. And then she hears Ianto’s voice raised in a scream of pain. It hurts like her own agony, like she’s lost a hatchling – and _oh_ , she knows how that feels, doesn’t she – and she throws herself against the metal grille, eager to be out and to fight. To tear apart whoever is trying to hurt her little one, the one who was here from the start.

At the same time she smells food, the same scent that Suzie used to put on the meat she fed Myfanwy. The combination roils up inside her, anger and hunger and fear for her Ianto, so defenseless with his soft skin and small blunt teeth and no claws at all.

She sees the metal-clad shape across the pool, follows the smell, jaws plunging into hot flesh, mouth filling with the taste of blood. She can hear Ianto screaming somewhere above her. But this is for his own good, so she ignores it; this will save him.

The metal hurts her teeth, cutting her mouth but she doesn’t care, she carries on. Lisa throws her metal fist to her face – and she may not have claws either but it _hurts_ , and she doesn’t want that to happen to Ianto, to any of the rest of them – but she carries on still, carries on until Lisa’s fallen to the ground, blood spilling from amongst the metal and into the pool of water.

Afterwards, when the lights are back to their usual level instead of red and flashing, when the loud sounds have gone quite and no one is screaming anymore, she watches from above as Ianto washes the blood off the ground. He’s covered in it himself, and she wants to clean him like she would her hatchlings, but she can’t.

Later, he comes up to her nest and brings her food as he usually does. He looks so tired, and she wants to tell him to get some sleep, that the danger is gone and she’ll look after him, guard him. She half-wishes he’d curl up in her nest like her hatchlings before had. But he keeps his distance.

After that day, she doesn’t see him for a while. She’s afraid at first, afraid he’s gone wherever Suzie has, that he isn’t coming back. It’s usually Owen or Gwen who brings her food now, and she’s restless, on edge.

Then Ianto comes back. She’s more relieved than she thought possible. Losing a hatchling was just something that happened, or so she’d thought once; something sad, a little piece of yourself extinguished, but the way of the world. But it’s more than that, she realises now; she doesn’t know what she’d do if she lost this particular hatchling of hers, the first one to find her and give her a home in this new place.

When he comes back he’s cautious, moving like he’s hurting all the time. She didn’t know his injuries from Lisa were that bad; she’d hoped she’d been able to protect him from the very worst of it at least.

But slowly, very slowly, she sees him begin to heal. Something’s changed him, Myfanwy knows, though she doesn’t know enough about what goes on inside his strange little head to guess what that might be.

But he’s growing. Not in the same way as her hatchlings back home, maybe, but still. She knows how they grow.

He’s close, very close indeed, to being able to learn to fly.

One day, Suzie comes back. But she’s not as Myfanwy remembers her. She smells different, like nothing alive. But not like carrion or dead flesh either; she merely smells like _nothing_ , and it frightens Myfanwy more than anything she’s every smelled before, far more than any predator or earthquake or storm.

She’d missed Suzie, but she’s relieved when she’s gone again; whatever happened to her, she’s not the same anymore. Not the same as the one who used to read her soft rhythmic words through the quiet hours of the night.

Or rather some part of her _is_ , and perhaps that’s what scares Myfanwy the most.

But after Suzie, time moves on. Her consolation is that Ianto looks happier again; there’s some shine to his eyes now, sometimes. He doesn’t come to her smelling of metal and blood anymore. And one day she finds out what’s changed.

Her little hatchling’s found a mate. She’s delighted when she sees him and Jack, pressed close together with some of their outer layers in disarray, hands on each other, moving together. Ianto’s making soft pleased sounds, shouting out the sounds of Jack’s name – and those sounds, those _names_ , she’d known they were important to them, so maybe this was what they used them for? - as Jack does something to him she can’t quite see, the two of them bent over one of the desks. But she knows this for what it is, can hear how much Ianto’s enjoying it, and she’s so glad for him.

She screeches in encouragement, and Ianto screeches too, immediately pulling away from Jack. She cries out again, wanting to let him know that he can carry on, that there’s no danger here, they’re safe and she’ll keep guard for predators.

They’re both making that pleased sound they make, clutching each other before they run out of the room. Myfanwy hopes she didn’t do wrong; her Ianto deserves to find a mate and have hatchlings of his own some day, and Jack, she thinks, is as good as any. Granted, he may smell a little odd, but she can forgive him that if it gives Ianto back some of the brightness in his eyes.

But it doesn’t last long; soon Jack’s gone again, and Ianto begins to fade once more. While he’s gone, Ianto comes to sit with Myfanwy whenever he can, which she likes. But she doesn’t like to see him so sad.

He tells her things, tells her how much he misses Jack. Tells her how afraid he is all the time, how they’re run ragged trying to fight on their own. She doesn’t understand all of it, but once again she noses at him with her beak, wishing he’d understand that he needs to rest, and that the offer’s always open to rest here, under her guard. He never sleeps as much as he should.

And then Jack’s back, and _oh_ , Myfanwy could kill him for leaving, if she didn’t think Ianto would hurt too. She’s coming to understand him enough to know that at least.

And so she contents herself with watching over him, with watching over all of them, from above.

Time passes; Jack and Ianto are often together now, and the others seem happy too. They’re all growing, growing like the hatchlings she lost never had a chance to. Now it’s past time for them to fly, dropping one by one out of the nest until they catch the thermals and glide joyfully over the valley.

But then it all begins to end.

There’s a new one here, a _Martha_. Myfanwy doesn’t know what to think of her yet – she smells like chemicals, and like the world and like time itself, and it makes her head spin – but Ianto seems to like her well enough. They all do, and for a while she’s glad.

Then, Owen dies.

Except, he doesn’t; he’s like Suzie, he smells like _nothing_ now, and Myfanwy’s nervous and skittish around him. He’s always here too, never sleeps. She’s scared, and she hates how they’re all hurting, all afraid of losing him even though he’s still among them.

And then one day, there’s a new one here; he smells like Jack does, yet not. He smells like fear and anger and pain, and there’s a loud sound like thunder, and the smell of blood. Tosh is leaving a trail of blood on the ground like wounded prey. Myfanwy wants to tell her to stop it, that anything could follow her like that. Tell her to make her escape, to get up in the sky where it’s safe.

But of course Tosh can’t fly. None of them can.

And then she dies, and Owen’s gone too, and Jack holds Gwen and Ianto and the three of them cry together below, the space filled with the smell of blood. They live a life of so much blood, her hatchlings, and it’s made them strong but she wishes she could have saved them some of it anyway.

But still they carry on, as they always do.

She’s outside over the ocean the night it all ends.

Ianto had let her out in the morning; she’s good now about coming back when he wants her to. She knows he doesn’t like it when she doesn’t, or when she goes near the shore. She doesn’t like the shore much anyway. The city is too noisy, too many smells she doesn’t understand.

It’s dark and she’s just flying back, roosting at the top of her nest, when she sees the lights below begin to flash red. She’s scared straight away; whenever that happens it means something’s wrong. She just gets a glimpse of Ianto, mouth pressed to Jack’s before Jack pushes him onto the platform they use because they can’t fly.

From her roost, Myfanwy can’t see Ianto’s face. But she can see Jack’s, upturned down below, with his eyes never leaving Ianto.

Now she knows how to read him, she can tell Jack is desperately afraid.

Myfanwy shrieks, flying upwards and out of the Hub; Ianto is heading for the surface, and once he gets there she’ll pick him up, she decides, fly him away from any danger. She soars into the air, leaving the red lights and the noise behind, waiting for Ianto to emerge so she can grab him.

And – _yes!_ \- there he is, stepping out of nothing and beginning to run. But he’s fast, and he’s going in the opposite direction, _and_ -

And even as she flies after him, the ground below her explodes in a roar of flame.

Sometimes, back at home, there were forest fires; this is nothing like that, but the roll of intense heat is similar. Though it does feel like it’s combined with an earthquake, a great storm, and every other calamity Myfanwy knows. There’s a loud noise, a whole cluster of them, and there’s a sharp, stinging pain in her wing membrane on one side, but she keeps flying, rising higher and higher. She can’t see Ianto, or Jack, or Gwen: there’s too much smoke, everything is shrouded in it, thick and black and choking, lit by flame from within.

She screams, circling high into the night as sparks flicker upwards and blue lights begin to flash, searing themselves across her vision. She’s crying out for her lost hatchlings once more. Last time it hadn’t hurt this much, but she’s _different_ now, she has a name of her own and she understands this world better and these ones, they _mean_ something to her.

They’ve survived so much, and they deserve the chance to fly.

For days and days she flies, roosting here and there sometimes; now she understands better the way Ianto had been, back then. The hurt that feels like a hole punched through the chest, even though there’s nothing missing, no gaping bloody wounds. As a matter of fact Myfanwy is hurt, a little; something clipped one of her wing membranes. It had bled a lot on the first day, and then it had swollen and ached, but now it feels a little better.

She’s grateful of that because it means she can still fly, and if she can still fly she can still keep looking.

It’s days and days more until she finds one of them again.

It’s Gwen; Myfanwy knows her by her smell, blown out on the ocean wind, long before she recognises her by sight. Gwen’s standing by the side of a great hole in the ground, something like a crater. As Myfanwy flies closer Gwen gasps, staring upwards in obvious recognition. Myfanwy lands at her side, claws scraping on the hard ground. Gwen reaches out a hand, her face running with salt water in the way they do. Myfanwy shoves her beak against Gwen’s hand, questioning, dreading.

“I’m sorry, Myfanwy” says Gwen, voice trembling. “He’s… he’s gone. That is to say… Jack’s gone, and I don’t… don’t know when… _if_ he’s coming back. And Ianto’s…. he’s...” she wipes her face on her sleeve, taking a steadying breath before letting out a shuddering sound that makes her whole body shake. “He’s dead” she sobs, eyes squeezing closed. “Oh, god, he’s _dead_ and there was nothing I could do and I’m so… so _sorry_...”

For once, Myfanwy understands perfectly.

She doesn’t stop to hear any more. She takes off, straight up into the sky, leaving Gwen behind.

Her chest aches, feeling heavy as a stone; she shouldn’t really be flying, perhaps, but she does anyway, she flies and flies. Screeching out until she can’t anymore, the cold air chilling her skin. She flies without knowing where, over the land, over cities and rivers and mountains and green fields. She only stops to drink water or to kill a sheep to eat when she feels as though her muscles wouldn’t move anymore if she doesn’t, and only then because she knows she has to keep flying.

At last she reaches another coast, another sea. The sun is coming out, burning away the ocean mist, and the waves lap against the sandy shore. There’s a city a little way off along the coastline, but she doesn’t turn towards it; not yet, not now. Maybe not ever again.

She’s failed her hatchlings, every single one. She’s never going home, either the home she left or the new one she made, and she feels as though she might break apart with the pain of it. And if she wasn’t like this before, then it means the things they taught her have _changed_ her, made her into something different. She only wishes she could have taught them something more in return.

After all, she thinks as she soars over the steel-grey breakers, every young one should have the chance to learn to fly.

**Author's Note:**

> .......Do you ever just impulsively decide to spend your Friday evening writing 4K words about Myfanwy the Torchwood pteranodon and accidentally make yourself cry in the process?


End file.
